Why We Need You to Show Up Before You Have it “All Figured Out”

Over the past couple of months—with holidays and cold weather and snow days—I have played a few games of cards with friends and family, and I recognized a recurring moment.

Photo Credit: Brandon King, Creative Commons

When you’re getting ready to play, someone more experienced explains the rules, maybe trying to present a few general principles to keep in mind about, as Kenny Rogers puts it, “knowing what to throw away and knowing what to keep.” After clarifying and asking questions, someone who is newer to the game says something like, “I think I get it, let’s just start playing and I’ll understand,” and the person doling out the instructions confirms:

“Yeah, you’ll see what I mean when we get going.”

I’m neither the first nor the most eloquent person (see above: Kenny Rogers) to compare life to a card game, but I noticed this opening exchange is one of the only scenarios in which I’m quick to say:

“I think I’ve got it, I’m sure I’ll keep figuring it out as we go.”

In contrast, I spend a lot of energy in real life thinking I can’t make a decision or take an action until I’ve analyzed every imaginary way everything could turn out—anything from a conversation with a friend to an entire career path.

My posture is usually one of worry: “Oh, but I just want to make sure of one more thing,” and, “Am I fully prepared for Scenarios A-G?”

A little more information than however much I have always seems like it would make a decision easier, clearer, and ultimately, less scary.

I get a kind of faux-comfort from these mulling-marathons.

I can’t give up my perpetual fretting about if something is a good choice. It’s tempting to think that if I put in my time dissecting something from every angle and polling everyone I know, then challenging consequences can be completely avoided or, at the very least, not be my fault.

Instead, I could benefit from carrying more of this card-playing attitude of, “hey, I know enough to start, and I’ll bet I’ll have what I need to figure out what to do next” into my real life.

We can, and should, listen and ponder and ask questions and soak in wisdom and expertise, but when you get right down to it, we learn what’s important and figure out how to put those things into practice during the game itself.

For the most part, we learn as we go.

Let me give you an example.

To mix metaphors for a second, the other day I taped up several wallpaper samples to choose between, and my husband walked by and said, “I like the top left, but it’s just hard to tell how it will look covering the whole room.”

Isn’t that always the way?

What you can see is just short of what would make it easy to act, and it’s hard not to think you’d be better off if you could have one more card in sight.

Choosing a career or figuring out a relationship or deciding how to change the world or your own self is more complicated than getting rid of the Queen of Spades, so I don’t mean to say that we should rush into real-life-scale decisions as casually as we deal a hand.

Yet life constantly asks us to act only on the cards we can see.

Even my most sophisticated worrying has never revealed some holy grail of insight that enabled me to predict the future or orchestrate a certain outcome.

Clever comparisons aside—in the real world we actually do have to go ahead and get going before anything is guaranteed.

Remembering this, I want to approach real-life situations from a posture of assurance rather than one of anxiety or worry. Because most of the time it really is enough to fan out the cards I do have, look at them honestly, keeping the most basic rules in mind (hopefully with friends at a card table), and go from there.